Nancy Isenberg said this quote

When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win.

~ Nancy Isenberg

For most Americans of the eighteenth century, it was assumed impossible for a servant to shed his lowly origins; the meaner sort, as one newspaper insisted, could never “wash out the stain of servility.” There were fears that the meaner sort were treading too close on the heels of those above them.

~ Nancy Isenberg

Every era in the continent's vaunted developmental story had its own taxonomy of waste people-unwanted and unsalvageable. Each era had its own means of distancing its version of white trash from the mainstream ideal.

~ Nancy Isenberg